Joyce Park: Can someone explain to me WHY so many people on both left and right seem so eager to believe COVID was a lab leak or otherwise man-made? Even if it was, are we now gonna start a war with China about it?

Can someone explain to me WHY so many people on both left and right seem so eager to believe COVID was a lab leak or otherwise man-made? Even if it was, are we now gonna start a war with China about it?

someone to blame + terminal contrarianism + unanswered (and maybe unanswerable) questions

It's often scarier to imagine "bad stuff just happens sometimes" than to think it was all by design. A conspiracy means there is order to the world.

Because otherwise Nature can wave its hand at random and annihilate a couple percentile points of the world's population. This is also the reason behind some people in severe weather areas believe conspiracy theories about the local government controlling the weather.

^^^this, "China fucked up/released a bioweapon" is easier to control than "the wrong pangolin met up with the wrong bat." ('cause especially if it was just an *accidental* leak, they will probably try not to have it again.)

also neither left nor right likes the CCP so they're easy to blame, and a lot of the "left" lab leak proponents have a Need To Be Smart, and they can't understand the biology, but waving at Clouds and Suspicions around scientists' work lets them be smart

It's an intriguing parallel to how much effort and ink has been devoted to the origin of syphilis and whether the so-called New World is really to "blame" (as if indigenous people in the New World wouldn't have plenty of blame to lay on Europeans for their own newly acquired infectious diseases)

A very stupid child went viral on TikTok recently for blaming STIs on men committing bestiality, ticking off on her fingers which animal each one came from. It got taken down, so now all that's left are the scientists who stitched it to explain that it's from butchering animals, not fucking them.

Or that the reason the flood hit their village is secret gates were opened to stop it hitting the town, which it totally would have otherwise

Makes the world seem more interesting/less arbitrary/potentially controllable/paradoxically less anxiety inducing than just, "whoops random stuff happens that can kill you!"

I think it makes people feel more in control--lots of people just don't want to imagine that there are in numerous deadly microbes worldwide that at any moment potentially could emerge to devastate animal and human populations; they'd feel much better if it was someone's fault & they could stop it

Correct lady of the Alan Moore quote about conspiracy theories, I think. Even if they don't insinuate a conspiracy, it's the same driving motivation.

"Correct lady"??? Corollary!

Also I'm now annoyed at the spelling error in the quote image I found.

This ship sails without a captain...

There's dark comfort in being able to blame humans for something rather than admitting that nature can wreck us at any moment

It's a twist on Just World Phenomenon thinking about individuals. We often prefer to think about a world where things don't happen by chance or accident and we make it so. So it can't be that a natural thing killed so many of us. It has to be somebody's fault.

A need for a sense of control and a rational universe. A

Its amazing how little I care where it came from. It took my wife. Nobody gave it to her on purpose.

Everything people in the replies are saying and also forgetting how badly so many of our leaders and public health institutions botched shit at the beginning. Not only forgetting, but not wanting to acknowledge they fucked up so badly and failed to prevent so much death.

I think if it came from a lab we can try to figure out how it got out and add some safety measures so it's less likely to happen again.

horseshoe conspiracy lovers

People need stories to make sense of a chaotic and random existence. Simpler people demand simple stories. “They made the virus” is a simple story that allows simple people to wash their hands of personal accountability, complexity, and the faceless implacability of nature.

“Simple” here is not used pejoratively.

Because lab leaks are under human control and wild zoonoses absolutely are not. Back in reality, there has *NEVER* been an epidemic or pandemic of a novel human virus from a lab leak. Not once. There have been dozens to hundreds of epidemics and pandemics caused by wild zoonosis, however.

Being agnostic (imo a fair place to land here) isn’t a natural resting place for most people cognitively but also really makes it harder to get engagement online.

Let’s say it was a lab leak. Magats think that it somehow absolves their cult leader from responsibility for failing to take adequate health measures and politicizing everything, which resulted in a million dead Americans.

both a desire for an explanation and China's inexplicable behavior early in the pandemic that 100% made it worse. frankly it doesn't need to be a lab leak for China to bear significant fault. if they had been honest and open about it from day 1 there might have been a chance at containing.

More important than winning a war with China - the lab leak people get to tell everyone else they were right all along.

On the right it is racism and attempting to remove blame from Trump. On the left it is just mostly racism. Horseshoe political beliefs will always have the US government as the villain for almost everything.

Provides an 'other' (incompetent or malicious Chinese scientists) to scapegoat

I'm not qualified to make a judgment on whether or not there was a leak, but what I do find interesting is that the NIH was funding research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Ergo, if there was a leak both the USA and China would share a reason to keep it quiet. www.reuters.com/business/hea...

US suspends federal funding to Wuhan lab over non-compliancewww.reuters.com The U.S. has suspended federal funding to China's Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) for failing to provide documentation related to concerns over biosafety protocol violations at the facility that has faced questions for years over the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

*could share a reason to keep it quiet.

Can you tell me WHY you feel like this is true?

I don't feel like it's true but I do think it's possible. What I believe is: If the pandemic was caused by a lab leak, inside an authoritarian global superpower (China) and research there was being joint funded w/ the other global superpower (USA) then none of us will ever find out the true story.

Ok but nothing about that bothers me. Whether it was a lab leak or natural evolution, what does it matter now?

I agree. The hearings today are just grandstanding and poor Dr. Fauci has been vilified for doing his job, in my opinion. Anyways, if you want to engage mentally with the murky origins arguments I thought this piece from last year was pretty good. www.theatlantic.com/science/arch...

There Is No Evidence Strong Enough to End the Pandemic-Origins Debatewww.theatlantic.com The recent fight over wet-market raccoon dogs underscores just how much prior beliefs can affect interpretation.

On Hee Haw they had a short recurring sketch that's as old as vaudeville, if not older. The guy says to the doctor it hurts when I do this and the doctor hits the guy with a rubber chicken and says then don't do that! That's the level of most people's understanding of healthcare.

Astroturf fodder. Please ignore.

I honestly thought they'd be over it by now!

1. Blame a pandemic that our government badly mishandled on a bipartisan boogeyman 2. If COVID is zoonotic and jumped species barrier because of human encroachment on wildlife habitat, that’s bad for people lining their pockets doing just that, so better for them to pretend it isn’t and didn’t

The hugely funny thing is that stipulating that 1) it was artificial and 2) it was a deliberately released act of Chinese bio war that we actually developed a counter for it in record time and “RAWR! PATRIOTS!” wouldn’t get it, thus aiding and abetting Chinese bio war

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